Wish (4 page)

“Y
ou are going to
die
when you see this.”

After a stomach-churning ride up and down roller-coaster hills in Miles’s moss green Volkswagen Rabbit, Bowie pulled Olivia out of the parked car and onto the sparkling sidewalk. Sea Cliff was far more glamorous than any neighborhood Olivia had yet seen, with boxy mansions surrounded by artful topiaries and imposing statues of lions flanking the columned front doors. Miles lingered by a high, wrought-iron gate that was set back from the road, and waited for the girls to catch up.

“Whose house is this again?” Olivia asked, following Bowie along the sidewalk.

“Graham Potter,” Bowie said, the heel of her boot catching in a crack and rocking her toward the curb. “He has this party every year. It’s sort of a spring tradition. Everybody meets at the community gardens in the morning and gets the ground ready for planting. And then they all come back to Graham’s, because it’s basically the most amazing house in the universe.”
She gestured up a winding stone path illuminated by dim bulbs embedded in the ground.

Tall hedges lined the property, and a few small bubbling fountains were scattered across the lawn, complete with backlit cherubic sculptures, naked and spitting into clear, shallow pools. “Graham’s dad invented some kind of software, I think,” Miles told her, digging his hands into his pockets and shuffling ahead. “Something computer related.”

Olivia’s jaw dropped as the house came into view. It was literally dug into the side of a cliff, with square, stucco boxes jutting every which way. The roof was covered in arched Spanish tiles, and floor-to-ceiling windows revealed a sparkling modern interior, straight from the pages of one of the design magazines Olivia’s mother had bought at the airport and never gotten around to reading. “Are you sure he didn’t invent the computer?” she asked, dumbfounded.

“I know, right?” Bowie laughed, dragging Olivia up onto the pristinely clipped lawn. Olivia expected an alarm to go off, or a pack of dogs to start howling at her heels, but Bowie seemed to know where she was going.

Miles and Olivia followed Bowie through a sliding glass door and into the brightly lit kitchen, where a group of kids was huddled around a high center island, balancing eggs on its butcher-block top. A few of them wore white cotton sheets tied around one shoulder, with lopsided floral crowns circling their heads.

“It’s the equinox,” Bowie explained, gesturing to the eggs. “You’re supposed to be able to balance an egg on its end. Pagans, togas…you know.”

Olivia swallowed and forced a smile, tucking the folds of
her long black gown behind her as if to make it disappear. She couldn’t have felt more out of place. The half of the party that
wasn’t
dressed in sheets and garlands wore ratty old jeans and printed T-shirts over long-sleeved waffle tees. Olivia crumpled her scarf into a ball and tucked it into her purse, and wished she could flush both of them down the nearest toilet.

Bowie grabbed a handful of cups from the marble countertop and ducked back through the door onto the redwood porch, where a crowd of guys in homemade togas stood around a keg. Bowie held up a finger to say that she’d be right back, and gestured to Miles, who was talking to a girl in overalls by the breakfast nook.

Olivia’s eyes flitted anxiously around the kitchen, a tight, twisting feeling clenching at her insides. Even at home, she’d never felt 100 percent comfortable at parties. She never knew what she was supposed to be doing or saying, or how she should be standing to look like she was having a good time. But Violet was always there to save her a seat, or bring her a drink in a red plastic cup.

After the summer, she’d pretty much stopped going out altogether. And when school started up in the fall, their friends had tried to include her, calling her on Friday nights to hang out in Morgan Jennings’s basement when his parents were out of town. But they had quickly given up. Which only proved to Olivia what she’d feared all along: They weren’t really
their
friends at all. They were Violet’s friends. And Violet was gone.

“Here,” Bowie said, passing Olivia a cup of foamy beer. “Come on, we have to save that poor girl from Miles. He turns into an eco-crusader at these things. It’s not pretty.”

Bowie maneuvered through a crowd of girls by the industrial-size kitchen sink, joining Miles and the girl he’d cornered in the pantry.

“Let’s go, Al Bore,” Bowie murmured, linking her arm into Miles’s elbow and dragging him through a high-ceilinged hallway, beckoning for Olivia to follow along. “The music’s this way.”

They shouldered their way through an endless, narrow hall, the insistent plodding of a bass guitar beckoning them into a sunken living room on the other side of the house. The space had been cleared of all furniture, save the tree-size potted plants sandwiching a wide brick fireplace. Against one windowed wall at the back of the room, with the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge twinkling in the background, a band was playing on an improvised stage.

“These guys rock,” Bowie said, as Miles sulked against the mantel, a floppy palm frond sticking out from behind his frazzled hair. “That’s Graham singing. Don’t they kind of remind you of Kings of Leon?”

Olivia squinted at the stage and nodded, even though Bowie might as well have been speaking in tongues. The music sounded like just about every indie band Violet had been obsessed with over the past two years, and Olivia struggled to remember her sister cutting out photo spreads from the pages of
Nylon
and plastering them onto her notebooks and locker. Basically, the recipe for Violet’s approval involved long, shaggy hair, skinny jeans, altered vocals, and heavy bass.

Graham’s band passed with flying colors on all counts.

Bowie squeezed into the crowd, tossing the points of her hair from side to side, her shoulders dipping up and down to the beat. All around her, kids were laughing, dancing, toasting
each other with easy smiles and half-empty glasses of colorful drinks. Bowie motioned for Olivia to join her, but Olivia pretended to be lost in the music, staring intently at the band as if she were studying the complexities of their compositional arrangements or instrumental breaks.

Onstage, Graham, whom she quickly recognized as one of the lounging hipsters from the courtyard, was sing-screeching into a handheld microphone, his damp, orange hair sticking to his face. He stood on the tips of his sneakers for one last earsplitting wail, before dropping dramatically to his knees and bowing toward the back of the stage, in a gesture that said either (A)
I’m praying to Mecca; please don’t interrupt,
or (B)
It’s time for a drum solo. I’m spent.

And that’s when Olivia saw him.

All inverted elbows and flying drumsticks was the skater boy from school. His face was flushed in an expression of blissful concentration, his green eyes blinking ferociously as loose locks of sandy blond hair flew spastically around his head. It was an impressive performance, equal parts exciting and terrifying, and Olivia’s eyes were glued to every heavy bass-drum thump, every shattered attack of the hi-hat. She’d never seen anybody look so free or alive. It was beautiful.

Somewhere in her periphery she saw Miles hovering by her elbow and heard him mutter something about another drink. She thought about nodding, but probably didn’t. It wasn’t until the drum solo ended and Graham had belted out another anthem-rowdy chorus, ending in a sweeping clash of cymbals and raucous applause, that Olivia remembered to try breathing again.

“Thanks for coming,” Graham panted into the mic when
the whooping shouts and whistles had finally started to fade. “We’re taking a little break, but we’ll be back for the countdown, so don’t anybody move, all right?”

The crowd responded in happy unison as Graham shoved the mic in their direction before flinging it to the hardwood floor with a muffled
thwap
, rock-star style.

Skater/Drummer Boy reached his long, wiry arms up overhead. His soft blue undershirt hiked an inch or so above a crackled leather belt, just enough to expose a section of his waist, the sharp line of muscle cutting down across one hip. Olivia felt the back of her neck getting hot, and she worried that she was actually sweating.

“So?” Bowie had reappeared at Olivia’s side and was stripping off her sweater, revealing a tiny black tube top, felted in clingy mohair fuzz. “What’d you think?”

“Do you know where the bathroom is?” Olivia asked. She felt vaguely dizzy, a deafening rhythm in her heart and her head, an anxious flutter at the base of her throat. She needed to run some cold water over her wrists.

Bowie pointed to where a short line was snaking back around a cast-aside armoire full of expensive-looking figurines and black-and-white photos in frames. Olivia took off through the crowd. As soon as she cleared a cluster of kids knocking back shots by the fireplace, she froze abruptly in place. There he was, waiting at the back of the line, propped up against a thick-framed map of the world.

It was too late to turn around. She took a deep breath and planted herself beside him. He wasn’t nearly as tall up close, and, sneaking glances of his profile, she spotted a neat little row of tiny round scars, barely hidden underneath a thin layer
of stubble at his jaw. Olivia’s heart thumped, and she clenched her hands behind her back.

“Is this the line for the bathroom?” she asked, and instantly regretted it.

No, this is just the way we stand, all lined up in a row for no reason. Welcome to California!

He turned abruptly toward her, shaggy hair falling over his sea green eyes and sticking to the slope of his nose. “Yup.” He nodded with a smile, pushing back at the hair that had fallen, as if to get a better look. His teeth were big and adorably crooked.

“Cool,” she said.
Cool.
She glanced at the floor for a trapdoor to fall through, hoping for at least a small fight to break out somewhere across the room. Anything to stop the uncontrollable fountain of lameness that was pouring out of her mouth.

“I keep seeing you,” he said. “In the courtyard, right? At school?”

And…now she was a stalker. She hadn’t been in school one week, and already she’d turned into the overdressed girl who stared too long and tried too hard.

Olivia swallowed and nodded, racking her brain for something officially not-psychotic to say back.

“I’m Soren,” he went on, extending a hand. “What’s your name?”

“Olivia,” she answered, taking his hand. It was warm and sweaty and strong. “I’m new.”

“Yeah, I caught that,” Soren joked, and then, through another heart-wringing grin, he whispered, “Welcome to Hippie High.”

Olivia squeezed her damp fingers tighter together and
harnessed enough courage to steal a glance back up at him. Which was about when she realized that he was looking at her. And not in a way that made her feel crazy, or like maybe she had arugula wedged between her teeth. Really
looking
at her. Like for one reason or another she’d caught his eye, and he couldn’t figure out how to look away. Like maybe he’d run out of things to say, not because he wasn’t interested. But maybe because he was nervous, too?

The bathroom door swung open and Graham stepped out, clapping Soren on the back as he passed.

“I should…” Soren pointed at the bathroom and Olivia nodded vigorously.

“Right, so,” she said, gesturing for him to go ahead. “Good luck!”

He smiled, a sweet, lopsided little grin, and closed the door between them.

Olivia nestled herself against the wall on the other side of the bathroom door. It wasn’t until the band was back onstage a few minutes later that she realized it had sounded like she’d wished him good luck with the toilet.

Graham was already gripping the mic and hushing the noisy crowd as Soren snuck out of the bathroom and headed back for the stage.

“So, since this year’s party fell right on the equinox, we thought we’d do a little countdown to spring,” he explained, wrapping his guitar strap over his chest and plucking out a few notes. “Can I get some help up here, Eve?”

From across the room, the miniature girl with purple fingernails Olivia had first seen sitting on Graham’s lap in the courtyard appeared and bounded up to join the band. She was
dressed in a candy red skirt with a hedgehog embroidered on one side, leggings, and an oversize black sweatshirt that had been cut at the collar. Her feet were bare and dirty from working outside.

“Who’s ready for some sun?”

The crowd roared. Soren leaned forward over his drums, peering out into the crowd and squinting. He was clearly looking for someone, his neck craning sideways and swiveling around the room. Until he was looking directly at Olivia. His mouth was open and he gave her a little beckoning wave, one hand now shielding his eyes from the halogen-lamp spotlight that hung from a crossbeam in the ceiling.

The little veins in Olivia’s neck pulsed and fuzzy black spots appeared in the corner of her eyes. Could this really be happening?

The other band members, a beefy kid with long, blond dreadlocks playing the bass, and a balding guy at the keyboards who looked at least thirty, were each joined by girls from the crowd, and Soren was still smiling. And waving.
At her.

Olivia inhaled, fueling the Jell-O-like wobble in her belly, and took a step forward. Just then, rustling footsteps approached from behind her, a cascade of silky, jet-black hair whipping her in the face as a blurry figure hustled by.

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” the girl called out as she ran up onto the stage, hopping next to Soren. He wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her tight to his side.

Calla. The glowing earth goddess Miles had pointed out at lunch. And, if possible, she looked even more naturally beautiful than she had before, in dark, faded jeans, a ribbed
white tank top, and chocolate brown flip-flops, her glossy, tanned skin glistening in the spotlight, her almond eyes dark and mysterious.

“Five…four…three…”

Graham was counting, people were yelling, the world was spinning…

Olivia’s face felt like it was about to explode. All around her, people were hugging and clapping, so she clapped, too. Until she realized that the band had started to play and she was still clapping, and now she was the new girl in the fancy dress, clapping to herself in the corner.